manufacture, of vulgar art and conquering science; he escaped, for there was little in him of the passion of the reformer to overcome his repugnance, and bid him stand fast and do battle with the world. Mr. William Morris, as seen in his earliest volume of poems-a volume full of beauty and strangenessmight appear to have much in common with Rossetti. Romantic beauty and chivalrous passion and tragic-picturesque situations attract him, and where can he find these in our work-a-day world? Miles and Giles and Isabeau, Constance fille de fay, and fair Ellayne le Violet are infinitely more pleasing company than Thomson and Johnson and Jones. The blue closet, the little tower, the ancient walled garden "in the happy poplar land," are far more delectable places for a lover of romance than the fields and streets of our nineteenth century. In The Earthly Paradise, though he may claim to be more than the idle singer of an empty day, and to lay ghosts, in truth the author lays no ghosts that haunt the hearts and brains of modern men. Nor is he in any but a superficial sense a disciple of Chaucer. The ride to Canterbury on breezy April mornings to the sound of jingling bells or the miller's bagpipe, under the conduct of jovial Harry Bailly, and in company with a parson who wrought and taught Christ's doctrine, and a ploughman inspired with the hearty benevolence of a Hercules, is all unlike the foiled search for an earthly paradise by weary wanderers. In that soft western land to which they have come without purpose or design, the disappointed questers, now grown old, exchange their northern stories with the old men of the city for stories of Greece. And month blooms and fades into month, and season into season, and at last death comes and makes an end alike of joy and sorrow. An unheroic melancholy, a barren autumnal sadness, broods over the whole poem. The flame of passion and endeavor rises up and sinks down again into coldness and ashes, and our eyes follow the brightness and dwell upon the gloom with a strange, enervating, æsthetic satisfaction. We come to hate death, not knowing what it means, and to love life, though of it we know but little

more; and the earth and heaven are but as a curtain hung around a narrow room in which play and laughter and weeping are heard; and last of all there is silence. Such poetry (and all the more because it comes from a spirit robust and vigorous in its sympathy with human passion) is in truth the poetry of despair.

But since The Earthly Paradise was first imagined Mr. Morris has found a faith. His heartiness of nature would not permit the passion of the reformer to remain dormant within him; his quarrel with the present time is acute; he still dreams indeed of an earthly paradise, but now he sees it afar off in the Socialist millenniumn. Though we get from Mr. Morris no original verse comparable with that of his earlier volumes, and though we may doubt of his millennium, we cannot but rejoice that he has quitted that strange dreamy western land, and stands a singer of hope in the streets of London. At least as a protest against the greeds and cruelties and unloveliness of the present there is a worth in lines which tell his dream of the future :—

"Then all mine and all thine shall be ours, and no more shall any man crave

For riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend for a slave.

And what wealth then shall be left us when

none shall gather gold

To buy his friend in the market, and pinch and pine the sold?

Nay, what save the lovely city, and the little house on the hill,

And the wastes and the woodland beauty, and the happy fields we till ;

And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead;

And the wise men seeking out marvels, and the poet's teeming head;

And the painter's hand of wonder; and the marvellous fiddle-bow,

And the banded choirs of music: all those that do and know."

Better, far better, Chants for Socialists with faith, however inadequate for the wants of the soul, and hope and charity, than the Earthly Paradise with all of life a melancholy dream.

Mr. Morris's teaching, in his character of a reformer, has something in common with that of a greater reformer who during forty years has been one of the chief influences of the age. To speak in a few words of the manifold lessons on art, and life, and national polity

which Mr. Ruskin has given to his countrymen may appear less becoming than to be silent; but in truth the cardinal doctrine which runs through all his teaching can be stated in a line. It is that men-men and not the works of men, men and not materials, or machines, or gold, or even pictures, or statues, or public buildings-should be the prime objects of our care, and reverence, and love. Hence it is that, as a writer on art, he necessarily becomes a moralist, since he must needs inquire from what human faculties does this work of art arise, and to what human faculties does it appeal? Hence it is that in the decline of architecture or painting he reads the degradation of national character. Hence it is that the life of the workman appears to him to be of higher importance than the quantity of work which he turns out. Hence it is that he has opposed himself to the orthodox political economy, now at last sufficiently discredited, with a sense that man, and the life and soul of man, cannot be legitimately set aside while we consider apart from these the laws of wealth or of so-called utility. No other truth can be quite so important for our own age, or for any age, as the truth preached so unceasingly and so impressively by Mr. Ruskin.

I have named some of the fixed stars that shine in the firmament of our literature; but all of these have not been registered on my map ;* and lesser lights are left unnamed, and clusters, and galaxies, and nebulæ must remain disentangled and unresolved. I have spoken of eminent persons, because literature, as Cardinal Newman has said, “is essentially a personal work." And I have spoken of these persons less as masters of technique, each in his own province, than as seekers for truth, because it seems to me a distinction of the literature of the Victorian period that it is the literature of a time of spiritual trial, difficulty, and danger, and that its greatest representatives have been before all else seekers, in matters social, moral, and religious, for some coherent conception or doctrine of life which shall

* Among names omitted, perhaps the most important is that of the great novelist who is now entering into the faine long since his due -Mr. George Meredith.

bring unity to our emotions and law and impulse to our will.

Two

Were we to anticipate the future of literature, of what worth were a guess or a venture at unauthentic prophecy? Some shy schoolboy on whom we had not reckoned, some girl in an unknown nook of rural England, may one day upset our cunningest calculations; and our hope is that it may be so. great factors, however, in the future, may be reckoned on with certaintyscience and democracy. Already scientific conceptions have had their influence on the creatures of imagination, and a great school of historical study, scientific, not in the vain pretension of possessing a complete theory of human development, but in its exact aims and patient habits, has arisen in England. Literature in the future must surely confront science in a friendly attitude, welcoming all the facts and all the new lights that science brings, while maintaining its own dignity and independence, and resisting the temptation to forsake its own methods and processes because they are other than the methods of science. All kinds of material should be welcome to the soul, if only the soul will preserve its own supremacy over the material which it uses. Having given ourselves away to observing and co-ordinating facts, having generalized from those facts, we must then recover our personal force and reassert ourselves as being, we ourselves, the first and last of all facts. "A man must sit solidly at home,'' says Emerson when speaking of the true uses of history," and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world." No, he need not sit solidly at home; he may go forth and converse with kings and the enroys of empires, and then dismiss them haughtily and re-enter with added wisdom and power into the empire of himself. It is possible, indeed, that the old arts and the old types of beauty may be unable to survive the influences of an age of science, commerce, democracy. Well, be it so; let us bid them a cheerful farewell, and confidently expect some new and as yet inconceivable manifestations of the spirit of order and beauty which can never become extinct while

man remains man. Beauty," says Emerson again, "will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men. It is in vain that we look for genius to reiterate its miracles in the old arts; it is its instinct to find beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and roadside, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from a religious heart, it will raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance office, the joint-stock company, our law, our primary assemblies, our commerce, the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist's retort, in which we seek now only an economical

use. Is not the selfish and even cruel aspect which belongs to our great mechanical works-to mills, railways and machinery-the effect of the mercenary impulses which these works obey? . . . When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation."

Here we may end in a spirit of good hope. hope. Let literature accept all modern facts, and at the same time let it assert and re-enforce the soul. From the meeting of new truth and fuller and purer passion, what but some higher and unimagined forms of beauty must arise? Possibly no art of the schools, but a nobler art of life. -Fortnightly Review.

Two centuries have elapsed since the publication of Anthony Wood's "History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford," yet no serious attempt has been made until now to improve upon that wonderful, but cumbrous and singularly ill-arranged compilation of precious materials. More than one modern antiquary has essayed to complete it by annotations or continuations; but nearly all subsequent historians have been content to quote it as an original authority, and Mr. Maxwell Lyte is the first who has ventured to go behind Anthony Wood, in the spirit of modern criticism, by ransacking the manuscripts of Bryan Twyne, and other unpublished documents in the Record Office and the great public libraries. The result is a handsome volume of the highest value and interest, which, however, must be regarded as an historical torso, since it

A History of the University of Oxford, from the earliest times to the year 1530." By H. Maxwell Lyte, M. A., Deputy Keeper of the Public Records. London : 1886.

+ A curious proof of Anthony Wood's almost mechanical accuracy is afforded by an entry in the Fasti Oxon.," stating that John Favour, of New College, graduated as LL.B. on April 31, 1585; which impossible date turns out to be textually copied from the original record.

On

concludes with the death of Cardinal Wolsey. In fact, Mr. Maxwell Lyte's History, in its present form, would be more properly entitled a History of the University in the Middle Ages, and we must still have recourse to Anthony Wood for the more eventful periods of the Reformation and the Civil Wars, in which the University played a foremost part. But a cursory glance at Mr. Lyte's Table of Contents is sufficient to show that a History of the University in the Middle Ages is no dry record of merely academical transactions. the contrary, as he truly observes, the early clerks of Oxford were anything but "a body of sequestered students, intent only upon the advancement of learning." They were a struggling and militant society, constantly in conflict with external authorities claiming spiritual or civil jurisdiction over them swayed by every current of popular opinion: waging an eternal warfare against the townsmen among whom they lived; and distracted among themselves by feuds of race, language, political sentiment, and philosophical or theological conviction. The well-known distich which describes Oxford as the hotbed of national strife was amply justified by the facts; and Mr. Lyte's readers are fully rewarded

:

for their patience in mastering the details of the medieval curriculum by narratives of disorderly outbreaks which make us marvel how, in so turbulent an atmosphere, quiet study could be carried on at all.

It is not very easy to understand why the author should have reserved for his ninth chapter an exhaustive examination of the myth which assigned the foundation of the University, and even of University College, to Alfred the Great. Suffice it to say that not a shred of real historical evidence can be produced in support of it. The passage which deceived Camden, and was imported by him into Asser's "Life of King Alfred," is now generally rejected as a forgery, dating, at earliest, from the reign of Richard the Second. Other records, alleging an equally ancient origin, are now believed to be of an equally recent date; and University College is more than suspected of having fabricated the whole story, for its own purposes, at the end of the four teenth century. The schools of Oxford, out of which the University afterward developed itself, cannot be traced back with certainty to a period beyond the reign of Henry the First. Indeed, one of Mr. Lyte's critics regards Giraldus Cambrensis' account of his visit in 1186 as the first historical mention of them. But the authentic history of the City in which these Schools grew up begins at least two centuries earlier, and was so important during the age immediately preceding the Norman Conquest as to deserve a fuller notice than Mr. Lyte awards to it.

Old as it is by comparison with the University, the City of Oxford is new by comparison with London and other seats of Roman colonies in Britain, or even with the older settlements of Saxons. Its situation on a low ridge of gravelly soil between the Cherwell and the Thames, protected by a network of watercourses on every side but the north, might well have recommended it for a station of the Roman legions, yet there is no record of its having been inhabited for centuries after the Saxon Conquest. A few traces of British occupation, as well as the remains of Roman villas, have been found in the neighborhood, but not on the actual site, of Oxford:

the Roman road from Dorchester to Bicester passes near, but not through, it; and in the long struggles between the kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex, no siege of Oxford, or battle for the possession of it, is recorded among the incidents of any campaign. It is an equally significant fact that we hear nothing of Oxford in connection with the Abbey of Dorchester, but nine miles distant, where St. Birinus is stated to have established his see in 624, as the first Bishop of the West Saxons.

The unwritten history of Oxford, indeed, really begins with the foundation of St. Frideswide's Nunnery in the eighth century on the site now occupied by Christ Church; for the fact of this foundation in 727, or soon afterward, admits of no reasonable doubt, whatever legends may have since obscured it. At this period Oxford, which had once been inclosed within the Mercian dominions as they encroached southward on Wessex, had again become a border-town of Mercia. This position it finally lost when Egbert, who succeeded in the year 800, extended his rule over all England. The alleged establishment of a mint at Oxford by King Alfred rests on the existence of coins with the inscription Orsnaforda or Oksnaforda, the interpretation of which has of late been gravely disputed. The first undoubted mention of the City in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is under the date 912. "This year,' says the chronicler, "died Ethered, ealdorman of the Mercians, and King Eadward took possession of London, and of Oxford, and of all the lands which owed obedience thereto." It is evident that Oxford already ranked as a place of some importance, since King Edward the Elder thus separated it from the province of Mercia, ruled by his sister, widow of Ethered, and brought it, with London, under his own immediate dominion. It is probable, but not certain, that its natural defences were strengthened during this century by the remarkable conical mound known as the Castle Hill, to guard it against incursions of the Danes moving up the river, "the great border-stream of Wessex and Mercia." It seems to have been the first town erected on the Thames above London, and must have increased in importance when London

and the lower Thames valley were lost to England in the Danish Wars. There are some reasons for conjecturing that it had actually fallen into the hands of the Danes in the raids which preceded the peace of Wedmore (878), and was then restored. At all events, it appears to have been a fortified place before the end, if not at the beginning, of the tenth century and to have become the capital of a shire, incorporated into the kingdom of Wessex, already on the eve of embracing the whole kingdom of England.

It was at Oxford, and probably within the precincts of its Castle, that Ælfward, son of King Edward, died in 924, very soon after his father. Oxford, however, can scarcely have been a town of the first dignity, if it be true that a National Gemot or Council was held, not there, but at Kirtlington, eight or nine miles distant, in 977, the King and Archbishop Dunstan being present; and that, when the Bishop of Crediton suddenly died there, his body was conveyed, not to St. Frideswide's, but to St. Mary's at Abingdon. At the opening of the next century, however (1002), it was forced into an infamous notoriety by the massacre of Danes perpetrated there by King Ethelred's order. on St. Brice's day. In the course of this massacre, which is known to us through a charter of King Ethelred himself, the unfortunate Danes took refuge in the tower, or church, of St. Frides wide's; but the people set fire to the wooden roof, and they were all burned with the sacred edifice. It is hardly surprising to hear that seven years later (1009), the victorious Danes, Danes, having marched through the Chiltern woods, sacked and burned Oxford, returning to their ships. They visited the country again in the following year; and in 1013, King Sweyn imposed "his law" on the men of Oxford and Winchester-towns which, in this century, are mentioned as almost in the same rank with London.

In 1015, Oxford again became the meeting-place of a National Gemot, and the scene of another treacherous murder. As the English Chronicle informs us in its simple language: "there the Ealdorman Eadric insnared Sigeferth and Morkere, the chief thanes in the Seven Burghs. He enticed them

into his chamber, and therein they were foully slain. And the King then took all their possessions, and ordered Sigeferth's widow to be taken and brought to Malmesbury." Malmesbury." In the following year Ethelred died, and was succeeded by his son Edmund Ironside, who had seized the widow of Sigeferth and made her his wife. After a short but stormy reign of a few months only, Edmund suddenly died on his way back from Gloucester to London. According to Henry of Huntingdon, he was assassinated at Oxford by order of the same traitor Eadric, who had in the meantime submitted to Canute. Two years after his accession (1018), Canute also held a Gemot at Oxford, where "the Danes and Angles were unanimous for Eadgar's" (that is, for English) "law." In Oxford, therefore, and doubtless within the precincts of Oxford Castle, were enacted several tragical incidents of the Danish invasion, as well as the solemn acceptance of English law, though under a Danish ruler. Eighteen years later, on the death of Canute in 1036, another great National Gemot was held at Oxford, and elected Harold Harefoot, under the influence of Northern thanes and Londoners, opposed by Earl Godwine, who, however, secured the dominion of Wessex for Harthacanute. In 1039, or 1040, Harold Harefoot died at Oxford. Nothing is heard of the City during the next twenty-six years, except that its tolls were regulated by law under Edward the Confessor, and that Earl Harold, afterward King, passed through it on an expedition into Wales. In 1065, however, it once more becomes memorable as the place selected for the famous Gemot at which Tostig, Harold's brother, was outlawed. Morcar was made Earl of Northumberland, and the Danish law was actually re-enacted, apparently at the instance of powerful nobles, representing the Danish section of England, whom Harold resolved to conciliate, against the wish of the King.

Considering the space which Oxford fills in the history of the eleventh century, it is remarkable that it should have played no important part in the great drama of the Norman Conquest. It has been alleged, indeed, that it was besieged and half demolished by William the Conqueror; but there is no trustworthy evi